Central Europe and the Metaphysics of Politics

by Mateusz Stróżyński

When Winston Churchill said on March 5, 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, that “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” he observed that Europe had become divided into two spheres of influence: one dominated by the Anglo-Saxon allies and the other by the Soviet Union. However, the division of Europe already had a longer history. The concepts of Western Europe (civilized, rich, progressive) and Eastern Europe (uncivilized, poor, backward) were already present in the European imagination in the eighteenth century. A Polish historian, Andrzej Nowak, has recently pointed out that the very concept of Eastern Europe can be traced back to the official justifications of the imperialistic expansion of Russia. For instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Emperor Peter I constructed an image of Russia as both European and Asian, with a mission of civilizing the uncivilized, and Eastern Europe was key to that allegedly civilizing and indeed imperialistic and colonialist project. Interestingly, it was during Peter’s reign that the ancient border of Europe on the river Don was replaced by Russian cartographers with a new border, on the Ural Mountains, which remains the accepted boundary even now. Nowak argues that the very concept of Eastern Europe is an ideological space of Russia’s special interests and rights, negotiated with what has become “Western Europe.”

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